Remembering Photographer David Armstrong

The portrait was David Armstrong’s medium—a quick, contained look at one person’s life, an impulse, perhaps, he picked up as a young guy spending time around so many interesting lives worth being photographed. Armstrong, who died Saturday night at 60 years old, came of age alongside Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson, and the entire Boston School, who made their wild lives in artists’ hamlets in Massachusetts and New York into art. Armstrong was committed throughout his long career to the style he developed early: natural light, soft focus, close up, all the better to show off his subjects, who were often beautiful young boys.

When he started to receive fashion commissions later in life, his instinct towards youth overlapped with fashion’s own obsession with the young—it was perennial teenager Hedi Slimane who first brought him into the fashion fold for a series of backstage photos of Slimane’s work at Dior Homme in the early 2000s. And his ability to capture true intimacy in the bombastic world of fashion led many designers and editors to seek him out, including the Mulleavy sisters of Rodarte. “His work was poetic and spirited, and what he made mattered,” Laura Mulleavy tells Vogue.com. “His vision was personal and inspired so many.” In other words, a life worthy of its own portrait.